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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Button Art is cooler than you

Long story short, I’m obsessive compulsive. When I’m bored I
like to keep my hands busy by normally organizing, or when I was a kid I made
those ‘rad’ fabric bracelets and wore ten of them at one time on my arm even
when I was in the shower… ahem. Yes.

So needless to say after a month of living in the new
apartment I started to get a little squirrely on the weekends when video games
no longer sated the need to ‘do something’. The boyfriend will contest that it
is a state most dire, when I flop of the couch, sigh repeatedly and say ‘I’m
borrredd’.

He hates and loves that shit.

Well, I found myself bored with a lot of buttons.

‘Why do I have a shit-ton of buttons?’ you may ask?

None of your goddamn beeswax good sir. I had them for a very
long time as I don’t throw out anything that could be useful. How I’m not a
recurring star on hoarders still baffles me.

But I had all these buttons.

And a paint gun, some beat up cardboard and crap loads of
time.

Button Art was born.

This is the final creation after one of the most frustrating
outings to Walmart I’ve ever had. That is a whole other story about how no one
in this world has buttons and apparently asking for them at the dollar store,
Walmart, crafts stores and home hardware deserves ridiculous glares and confused looks like I've asked for Soylent green

It took some time, but the design was simple. Curvy stuff
plus cute bursts of colour surrounded by black (because my walls are all white)
equals ‘art’.

How-To (thank me later)

1. Design: This is where you decide what you want to do with what you have. I did white swirls with small colour burst. You might be feeling a glob of rounded poop on a silver platter. Whatever floats your boat.

2. Paint that on your cardboard: I didn't do this and now regret it. So make sure you paint your cardboard first. It also gives you a blue print to follow when putting back your buttons. I would have appreciated this earlier in the design.

3. Heat up your glue gun: Pretty obvious what to do here and why. Cold glue is solid people.

4. Begin with your least moveable object: Glue the back of your buttons with a small amount of glue and put them on your design. Make sure you start with your main focus or fixed center. It's better to start in the middle and build out.

5. Continuing buttoning until your fingers hurt: That's just the hot glue, don't worry so much. Just remember to be safe and not to put the glue gun on anything important, like a cat.

6. Dry

7.(actually#2) Hang: if you were smart enough you'll go back to number one and before you start gluing you'll add your hanging hardware after you design. I didn't so a hole was poked and it's sitting on a nail. Button's aren't heavy so it didn't need much to keep it on the wall.

8. Take a picture and send it to me. This is the most important step!!! I must compare your button Art to mine and determine who's is cooler than yours. Which would be mine. (just kidding, I mostly want to see who else is compulsive enough to do the same damn thing)

9. Enjoy!

10. 9 steps isn't enough. It took way too long. Or you could use this time to bandaid the blisters you most likely received gluing the tiniest buttons you've ever seen.

Would I do it again?

I plan to but finding the buttons for my next ambitious
project has been pretty trying on my tiny amount of patience. And I’m suffering
from acute and super lame insomnia this week – so another time!!!